Meanwhile, German universities are teaming up for joint negotiations with journal publishers. Their first target is Elsevier. My university came close to losing access to Elsevier journals as a part of this move.
Consortia memberships in the US and Canada are not uncommon either. However, Germany possess our only perpetual license.
A lot of us desire open access, however, we are not sure how we would fund ourselves. Our subscription rates are generally very low. Especially compared to these large journals.
Re:open-access? Perhaps. I should note that this area is not my expertise. However, what to do when the grant runs out?
Even so most of our revenue comes from the subscription. A grant may pay for hosting, but what about the time of the developers. Or those working on the publication side. We are already on a near skeleton crew. Especially compared to what we had here in the 1940-80s.
Well, you get another. Lots of non-profits run only on grants.
Have you thought about applying for EU grants? Open Access is one of the goals on Horizon 2020, the €80B EU program[1], but even after that there's no shortage of EU cash being dumped on anything even barely related to "innovation".
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/sites/horizon202...
> [...] an impasse in fee negotiations between [Springer Journals] and Couperin.org, a national consortium representing more than 250 academic institutions in France.
Of course I would prefers solutions which get rid of elsevier, springer etc...